


An analysis of first-hand accounts of interactions with an unconfirmed entity known as “Kala.”

by onelonelystory



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Academia, Gen, technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:16:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28492260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onelonelystory/pseuds/onelonelystory
Summary: Abstract:While the existence of the supernatural is unverifiable via our current means, it is undeniable that people have reported interactions with inexplicable and inhuman entities. To detach these encounters entirely from the lens of their supernatural context would be to remove their common factors. By analyzing from an objective position the recurring themes in supernatural encounters, commonalities are revealed within interconnecting cultures, regions, and communities. The Magnus Institute’s vast collection of self-reported encounters with the supernatural can be used to classify types of experiences and create a full contextual image of the relationship between cultures and a specific sort of encounter.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	An analysis of first-hand accounts of interactions with an unconfirmed entity known as “Kala.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written as part of the [Avatar of Fear fanzine,](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NmJQgcQcUXZxtE6k1thAvlyRLY-KPqGG/view?usp=sharing) which I highly encourage you check out! This piece looks a lot more professional there, first off, and mine is only one of many works! Check out their [ tumblr ](https://avataroffearzine.tumblr.com/post/639155338580525056/hey-everyone-the-avatar-of-fear-a-magnus-archive)here, too!

# 

# An analysis of first-hand accounts of interactions with an unconfirmed entity known as “Kala.”

by Arusha Davies

  


  


Abstract:

While the existence of the supernatural is unverifiable via our current means, it is undeniable that people have reported interactions with inexplicable and inhuman entities. To detach these encounters entirely from the lens of their supernatural context would be to remove their common factors. By analyzing from an objective position the recurring themes in supernatural encounters, commonalities are revealed within interconnecting cultures, regions, and communities. The Magnus Institute’s vast collection of self-reported encounters with the supernatural can be used to classify types of experiences and create a full contextual image of the relationship between cultures and a specific sort of encounter.

  


  


Firsthand reports of the supernatural provided by the archival department of the Magnus Institute were examined for commonalities to allow a focus on a specific pattern of language that seems to tie the reported experiences to a singular body. From the reports an analysis can be derived on the manifestation of impressionist fear in recurrent paranormal tales, and how their ties into local legend, tangible evil, and cultural anxieties can develop into miraculous lore.

In the first quarter of 2011, the Archival department at the Magnus Institute opened a folder on an unconfirmed entity. This is a process that occurs when at least two independent statements, separated by at least 18 months to filter out trending urban legend, effect a common name in the description of similar encounters. Gertrude Robinson (Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute) will only provide files and discoveries upon request, so the folder was not known by the research department until quarterly interdepartmental reports. There were, actually, seven total folders opened in that same quarter, but of them, only three have since been updated (through either new or previously uncategorized statements), and only one has amassed more than five total statements. Upon request, Robinson was able to provide thirty-seven statements in some way relating to the entity “Kala.”

Which report of the thirty-seven comes earliest chronologically is, unfortunately, not a straightforward answer. The first record in the archives that could be tied to Kala is a 1983 statement by a Ms. Judy Vice, a school teacher from Amesbury who was referred to the Institute approximately a year after her alleged encounter occurred. However in January 2011, a report was filed by an unverified[1] source under the alias Elizabeth Bhamadipati, “regarding livestock and the pain they do not feel,” that heavily suggests an encounter[2] predating Ms. Vice’s by at least 18 months (Bhamadipati 2011, p. 2). While the Institute’s research department has been unable to locate Bhamadipati or confirm the events surrounding the encounter (supernatural or otherwise), the details provided in this singular statement “enabled the discovery of an indisputable web of connections between the stories of a number of patrons,” and thus cannot be dismissed entirely. It will also be considered within the context of two other records that contain the strongest threads of reliable further investigation and implications of an identifiable supernatural entity to provide corroborating evidence.

The Bhamadipati statement is an example of the “I statement,” a phenomenon present in over 60% of folders on named entities (Sims 2012, p. 20-21). The “I statement” is a record in which a patron personifies an entity, either as the original namesake or more frequently as an unverifiable source, discussing their past and motivations as a supernatural entity. Often these statements use corroborating evidence from other records and, as Sims notes, “while it is not impossible for one to gain access to files from the Magnus Archives, these statements are not a matter of public record, and the recurrence of this phenomenon would be beyond impractical to fabricate,” which seems to imply that, even if only as myth and lore, these entities exist outside the walls of the Archives. As the Kala “I statement,” Bhamadipati serves to bridge the gap between collected lore and the cultural context being investigated.

As stated previously, in 1983, Ms. Judy Vice came to the Magnus Institute to report an encounter she had with a “ghostly apparition of flesh and blood” who had “stolen the sensation from [her] lips and eyes” and provided a full written statement to the archives under supervision (Vice 1983, 2, 7). In this statement she repeatedly expressed regrets over the pain she had caused her students. A deeply religious woman, Ms. Vice seemed to consider her experience divine retribution. This tracks to a trend of behavior in patrons at the time, of rationalizing esoteric experiences by finding God or some other higher power to be responsible, possibly echoing growing sentiments of inevitability and obsolescence (Monroe 2005, 32).

At the age of 35, she began to demonstrate symptoms of congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis[ 3 ], a nervous system disorder that manifests during infancy. The institute was unable to obtain the medical records of Ms. Vice following her untimely death, but personal testimony of her partner and elder sister corroborate her claims that she was not experiencing these symptoms prior to the time of this encounter. After finding evidence to connect Ms. Vice’s statement to Kala, the research department at the Magnus Institute was able to find employee records from a local deli of a Kala Ramapravesh[ 4 ], hired two days before Ms. Vice’s earliest encounter, who seems to have quit the same day Ms. Vice passed away.

  


From the statement of Ms. Judy Vice, 1983

  


> _Three weeks after I sent that poor boy home crying, I was greeted by an apparition. I could hear her pulse, clear as day, but she was not there, I am sure of it. When she was present my mind was blank, as though the surrounding world had disappeared. She did not exist to them. Only to me._
> 
> _I was too proud then, to admit that I had made a mistake or crossed a line. She spoke with me like a person would have, drank as though she were real. I expressed frustration over the lack of discipline in my classroom. She seemed to understand. Words seemed to leave my mouth without thinking, around her, and I was more honest with that ghost than I am with God, I think._
> 
> _She never left me alone between the time she appeared in my life and the time she vanished. When I worked, when I slept, when I travelled, when I ate, she was there. (p. 2-3)_

  


From the Bhamadipati statement:

  


> _There was that nice girl, what was her name? I forget. School teacher. Real English rose type, sweet smile, white face, big eyes. It was just after the ruling [ 5 ], I remember. She found a certain… necessity in corporal punishment. Was one of the girls in school who’d only ever caught teacher’s ire once or twice and determined with tear-filled eyes she’d never stray from the path again. It’s what they all believed. Associate all deviation with pain and they’ll stay in line._
> 
> _It doesn’t really hurt, you know. A switch. Take it from someone who’s seen the business side of many over the years. They can do some real damage, those, if you’re not careful, or maybe especially if you’re careful, but they won’t make you feel pain. All of a sudden you’ll feel nothing at all. Your nerves will stop sending information to your brain and your brain doesn’t know what to do with nothingness. It whites out. And that’s what works, actually. It’s not that bad little children learn not to be bad, it’s that eventually it’s all whited out and all that’s left is the muscle memory of the factory line._
> 
> _And that’s what Ms. Teacher dedicated her life to. Don’t we sound like kindred spirits, Gertrude? We, the both of us, taking away pain. I thought I ought to pass on the favor. All I was asking for was what she was asking for. If she’d taken every step as she always did, she shouldn’t have had any problems. I think the problem was she saw herself as the taker. As though there exists, somewhere in the machine, validation for having built it. That’s a thinking man’s game, Gertrude. There is no one pulling the strings, no one paving the way, only paths that have formed from the wear of how they have been tread. (p. 4)_

  


It is possible that Bhamadipati was not referring to Ms. Vice’s statement here. However the commonalities were notable enough for the archives to draw a connection, which was able to empirically connect Ms. Vice’s statement to that of Andre Blaire in 2007. Ms. Vice had taught mathematics at the Mayfeld Cornwall Academy for over a decade before she passed away, during which time Andre Blaire attended the same school. He was withdrawn from the school by his parents after his grades failed to meet their standards, but not before having Ms. Vice as a teacher the very trimester of her encounter. In his statement, Blaire mentions his schooling, even specifically mentioning “a usually strict teacher who grew more withdrawn [... and] came to class bruised often,” lamenting it as one of the things his youth and the distractions around him prevented him from caring as much as he wished he had (Blaire 2007, 2-3).

Blaire was a salesman. He had followed in his father’s footsteps, though he makes clear in his statement he had not intended to. His words are a record of several traumatic incidents and he notes “after each blow, when [he] was in a haze[ 6 ] and unable to comprehend what had happened, [he] found [himself] back on the path of inevitability,” which is what he claims eventually led him to become a salesman without even fully realizing it. This is not what he reports as his supernatural encounter, though it is worth mentioning for the way it intersects with previous sentiments.

There is considerable precedent in studying how different tellings of the same lore can be “equivalent to a record of the diversity of experiences that form dominant cultural anxieties,” but there is limited research into what causes themes and characters to recur from stories that don’t reach the greater sphere of known urban legend (Lekeland 2008, 74-75). The thematic consistency can be explained by cultural factors, but the recurrence of identifiable characters is difficult to rationalize. Here is where the connection between Blaire and Ms. Vice becomes critical. The physical description of Kala in Blaire’s statement resembles five other statements, those being the only ones to describe Kala by appearance.

  


From the statement of Andre Blaire, 2007:

  


> _She was a young woman, maybe 26, 27 years old. I’d never seen her before, and that should have been suspicious, but we have a lot of temp employees around the office and over the years I’ve had to dial down the volume on my paranoia almost constantly. Out of habit alone any warning bells she might have set off were deafened. She was pretty, too, in an exotic [ 7 ] sort of way, with warm skin and dark hair tied back at the sides so it still hung down to her waist behind her. I remember being so distracted by her hair that it took me a while to notice her scars._
> 
> _There were quite a lot of them. And I am saying that as a fellow scar patient, there were a lot. One long, jagged line traced her bicep up to her jaw, where it split into three lines that spread across the left side of her face, almost as though whatever blade had done it to her had gotten twisted mid stroke. There was a scar on both the front and back of her right shoulder that looked to me like an electric drill scar, though that might just be my own biases. Clean, thick lines on each of her limbs that made up price tags. Thirty pounds for her right forearm. Only twenty for the left._
> 
> _All of this felt normal, and even now looking back I can explain all of that in ways that feel all too familiar and make me sad for the young woman. But when I looked into her eyes there was blood spilling out of her irises, and she didn’t seem concerned by it at all. She blinked and droplets caught in her lashes before slowly crawling down her skin. (p. 4)_

  


Given that Ms. Vice states that Kala was constantly present in her life for a number of weeks including when she was teaching, it stands to reason that a 13 year old Andre Blaire could have come into contact with the entity at the same time, and later reconstructed her image during a traumatic incident. This suggests the rationalization for Kala falls into the category of the “ageless fleeting memory,” where a singular person made an impact on a number of people that was not notable in the moment, but was subconsciously connected to a particular feeling and therefore the person was misremembered as being present during a highly stressful event (Sims 2012, 27-28). The theory follows that a narrative will be inherently formed by patterns in emotional responses. This is the category typically used to justify entities that appear to be unaging over the course of multiple decades of records.

According to Blaire, on December 17, 2006, there was a blackout in his place of work. When the lights went out he was alone in a meeting room, with a single contract in front of him. When they returned, he asserts, there was a woman in the room with him, and that his pending assignments had been printed and prepared in his briefcase. Research from the institute has been able to verify the power outage, as well as one Kala Nambiar having signed in as a guest of Blaire’s. There is no record of her signing out, nor any remaining footage in which she appears, though most security tapes had been erased by the time the research department had been made aware of the file.

  


From the statement of Andre Blaire, 2007:

  


> _Eventually each scar I had ever gained had been reopened and all I could hear through the blank haze was my pulse beating unevenly and laboriously, all I could see was the steady flow of blood from where it came._
> 
> _“That’s me,” she laughed. “That feeling right now. You know it well, don’t you? That’s me.”_
> 
> _I remember thinking that was bold of her, to lay claim on my nothingness. And then I remember not thinking much anymore. (p. 9)_

  


The gruesome encounter was unable to be confirmed. It was determined that if anywhere near the amount of blood loss Blaire claims to have suffered truly had occurred, he would have died (Saunders 2009, 12). Some amount of mistake can be attributed to hallucination or exaggeration, but researchers were unable to find traces of blood in the meeting room references, or any paperwork to indicate the flooring had been altered since the incident. However, the entity’s personification of feelings and sensations is heavily echoed in the Bhamadipati statement, to a degree that it is thematically relevant to understanding the lore that has been constructed around Kala.

  


From the statement of Judy Vice, 1983:

  


> _I don’t know if there is a way to describe this apparition. A person, in form, but that was for my benefit._
> 
> _When I was a child I slipped into a creek and cut myself up on the rocks... She was the feeling you get watching blood slide steady and slow across your own skin, tickled by the sensation despite the numbness of your body and mind. (p. 3)_

  


From the Bhamadipati statement:

  


> _You won’t even allow me this transparent lie, Watcher? Of course my name is not Elizabeth, do you need to hear that from me? I am the way your breath fails to match pace with your pulse. (p. 1)_
> 
> _Her pupils were struggling to focus and her fingernails were digging deep ridges into her thigh. I could hear it too, you know. Her blood hit the linoleum like raindrops on a still pond, as though there were nothing else._
> 
> _“Is this you?” she asked._
> 
> _She meant was I doing this to her, was I the one taking the world away._
> 
> _The answer to both questions was yes. (p. 2)_
> 
> _“Methohexital, Thiamylal, Midazolam, Propofol,” she [ 8 ] said it like a chant, over and over. I took offense to that, you know. I can’t be caused by Diazepam. Not that I’d be opposed to trying. I’ll keep it in the idea box for if you ever want to go a few rounds. Still, I am not numbness. I am sensation. I’d happily show you, Gertrude. Does curiosity not call to you? (p. 6)_
> 
> _Not to sound trite, but I haunt livestock [ 9 ]. I don’t even need to be present. When each day is the same as the day before, when you are deliberately deprived to be no more trouble than what you’re worth, you cannot feel anything at all except the awareness of your own life slipping away. Anything at all except me. (p. 10)_

  


Even in reports that claim a physical encounter with Kala as a person, Kala is intangible. A feeling embodied, more than a form. Viewing this from a cultural context and following up on the previously mentioned religious resignation in Ms. Vice’s statement, these records personify personal fears. The fears themselves are incredibly divergent but they manifest in a way that can be concretely seen as part of the same narrative. The existence of Kala as a nebulously defined feeling allows for related themes to be prominently featured in any recorded encounter. What makes Kala and entities like her unique, is that there is record of both their narrative origin and how they presumably interacted with people, through the “I statement.” While these statements are difficult to research beyond the immediate circumstances of their recording due to previously mentioned obstacles, they provide an insight into the thematic constants in connected experiences.

Kala is an example of a supernatural entity that is unknown in pop culture, and yet can be found across multiple cross-referenced reports. The fear that she represents is abstract despite being represented by a singular body, and the consistency of her presence over three decades indicates a lingering cultural anxiety, rather than a singular horror story. From a cursory glance at her extensive file, conclusions can be drawn on what she represents in meta analysis. Should more deliberation be put into how alleged encounters outside of popular myth reflect the people who have them, larger scale studies could find insight into greater cultural phenomenon.

  


1 There are at least two UK permanent residents with the name used, according to an investigation done by the Magnus Institute in an attempt to follow up, but both denied having given the statement.  
2If true, this encounter would have taken place sometime in the winter of 1981. It is also implied that not all encounters were documented in this statement.  
3Two other statements in this folder report similar symptoms, but one patron passed away without next of kin prior to any investigation or follow-up, and the other is a minor ward of the state who was the only one to notice these symptoms in her father prior to his death.  
4A Magnus Institute researcher confirmed the existence of 7 women in the UK with the surname Ramapravesh who would have been between 20 and 35 at the time. None were available for comment, nor were any of them legally recognized as “Kala.”  
5Referring, presumably, to the 1982 ruling by the European courts to ban corporal punishment in schools without parental consent.  
6It should be noted that Blaire does later describe this haze as a “white out,” as in the Bhamadipati statement.  
7Most testimony and analysis seems to support that Kala appears to be of Indian descent  
8This being from a longer anecdote that nearly perfectly mirrors the events described in the statement of Lenore Hood, 1994.  
9This word is used interchangeably with both “people” and “animals” throughout the statement. The intentions of this specific usage is unclear.  
[return]

  


  


  


> Bhamadipati, E. (2011). Statement #0111001 regarding livestock and the pain they do not feel. Kala (av - noncrit, dni). The Magnus Institute Archives, London, England.
> 
> Blaire, A. (2007). Statement #0072707 regarding a woman and the ever present nothingness. Kala (av - noncrit, dni). The Magnus Institute Archives, London, England.
> 
> Lekeland, G. (2008). Modern folklore in urban communities within the United Kingdom. _British Journal for Modern Anthropological Study_ , 5(2), 63–77.
> 
> Monroe, J. (2005). Generational apocalyptic dread in manifestations of the supernatural. _The Magnus Institute Journal for Paranormal Research and Records_ , 92(2), 30–47.
> 
> Saunders, A. (2009). Forensic probability of reported supernatural encounters. _The Magnus Institute Journal for Paranormal Research and Records_ , 96(3), 11–22.
> 
> Sims, J. (2012). Patterns in monsters: analyzing metadata from the Magnus Archives. _The Magnus Institute Journal for Paranormal Research and Records_ , 99(1), 18–32.
> 
> Vice, J. (1983). Statement #9830302 regarding the absence of pain. Kala (av - noncrit, dni). The Magnus Institute Archives, London, England.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked it! One more reminder to go check out [ the whole zine, ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NmJQgcQcUXZxtE6k1thAvlyRLY-KPqGG/view?usp=sharing)and while you're out, maybe come say [hello!](https://onelonelystory.tumblr.com/)


End file.
